


The Metaphysics of Nothing

by ClockworkCourier



Category: Rogue One: A Star Wars Story (2016), Star Wars - All Media Types
Genre: Afterlife, Blind Character, Bonding, Canonical Character Death, Cuddling & Snuggling, F/M, Fix-It of Sorts, Geographical Isolation, Rating May Change, Romance, Sharing a Bed, Slow Burn, Somebody Lives/Not Everyone Dies, Spoilers
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2016-12-17
Updated: 2016-12-17
Packaged: 2018-09-09 07:14:47
Rating: Mature
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,924
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/8880841
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/ClockworkCourier/pseuds/ClockworkCourier
Summary: First fact: Death is not painless. In fact, dying in the atom-dissolving death ray from an operational floating destruction machine is kind of terrible and painful and the worst.
Second fact: You can't actually dissolve atoms. There's some law in intergalactic physics that prove the first fact slightly flawed. Go ask a physicist or someone who isn't currently coping with being immolated.
Third fact: The afterlife is very strange. There's more birds and rocks and weird creatures there than initially believed. 
Fourth fact: It's not half bad to kick around the (possible) afterlife with someone you've become fairly good friends with. (Fourth fact addendum: It apparently helps if they were fried out of existence with you.)





	

**Author's Note:**

> So I saw Rogue One last night and beyond my tears and general sadness about everything ever, I drove home completely aware that I was going to have to write a fic about something. After about an hour of letting everything set in, I decided that I was going to take my favorite power couple-that-should-have-been and write the heck out of them. 
> 
> Here's the product of that drive plus musing I did in the shower this morning. It's probably going to be a longfic. There's also probably going to be a lot of kissing.

If death is painless, then someone incorrectly informed Jyn Erso of that fact. Her death is, in fact,  _ very _ painful. It’s not a pain she’s well acquainted with, and not something she can immediately quantify and compartmentalize into something neat like ‘sore like a bruise’ or ‘ripping and tearing’. She’s had broken bones and open wounds and everything in between, and she’s even been slugged in the solar plexus by a droid, which hurt so bad that she saw stars and lost her breath for a moment. Her death and all the pain related to it is nothing she’s ever experienced.   
  
Maybe it’s the pain of all of her cells being vaporized in one white-hot blast. Maybe it’s every nerve ending being baked in the heat of ten thousand suns or something to that effect. And maybe it’s, again, nothing she’s ever felt and nothing she can understand. Losing consciousness would be a gift, to be honest. But she’s deprived of that, and it feels like she spends an eternity caught in some kind of inverse event horizon of agony. If there’s relief in the afterlife, it’s taking its dear sweet time reaching her, or her transport to it has been horrendously delayed.   
  
The only thought that manages to permeate all of this, to poke through the agony, pain, suffering, and what ever other word she might be able to summon to describe even a fraction of her experience, is that somewhere out there, beyond the reach she doesn’t have, Cassian’s there too. Maybe. Not like she can tell, seeing as how she feels like she’s alone in the core of a nova. She just knows that they were immolated as a pair, and the last thing she felt that wasn’t raw awfulness was his arms around her, the callouses of his hands, his breath cold on her skin in comparison to the oncoming destructive heat. So that might just be why the thought sticks in her head.   
  
The last thing she really felt was Cassian Andor.   
  
Her final, tiny bastion of independent thought that isn’t currently preoccupied with being destroyed over the course of forever is that she hopes he’s not going through the same thing. Being turned to ash but never actually  _ getting _ there is, not even objectively, the  _ worst. _ For both of them to go through it is just unfair.   
  
Beyond that little oasis of thought, there’s not much else she can bother to think. Theoretically, it probably would be a good plan to think of something pleasant, like being reunited with her mother and father and all the questions she would have for both of them. But it’s difficult to think beyond the borders of a death ray, so she’ll have to save it for a moment when she’s not being ripped from existence.    
  
The Force, then. That might be something positive. After all, if the Jedi and people like Chirrut were right, and she liked to think that they were, then she’s as much a part of the Force as Cassian and her father and even the enormous amount of kinetic energy in the death ray that killed her. So she mentally sits in the bastion of her mind and focuses on that as much as she can. The Force, the movement of it, the great web of life and death and rebirth and all that other philosophical business. Good and evil and light and dark and something about dichotomies. The Force is supposed to be destiny and fate in one entity, but it doesn’t seem like a spectacular choice on its part to have her fate and destiny be... this.    
  
Well, unless she’s being metaphysically punished for every crime she’s ever done. Then maybe that’s a little bit more fair. Not entirely, but she can afford to give the Force the benefit of the doubt. It’s not an Imperial work camp, and in fact her death makes the work camp and the prisons she’s been in seem like a delightful vacation to some resort moon.   
  
_ Okay, _ she thinks. Or, she  _ thinks _ that she thinks. It’s hard to tell when all of her brain cells are being burnt in a galactic hellfire.  _ I get it. I really do. I’ll never do a bad thing again in my entire life or afterlife or whatever. Is ‘sorry’ enough? _   
  
If there’s an actual response, she isn’t sure of it. There might be, or maybe she’s just being hopeful, but she’s fairly sure there’s a ripple of sensation in the distance, like a heatwave on the surface of... well, the hottest ray of perpetual death and destruction. Either way, halfway through eternity, something seems to change.   
  
_ And Cassian, _ she quickly adds in the thought-not-thought that kind of feels like its taking place outside of her body and mind.  _ I know he’s done a lot wrong in his life, and he was kind of an ass to start with but... Alright, so was I. I get it. We get it. _   
  
Who or what she’s pleading to, she’s not sure. Maybe the Force, or maybe some great all-encompassing deity, or maybe nothing at all. There’s a lot of ‘maybe’s in her death, she’s noticed.   
  
But something’s listening. Something out there has to hear her, because eternity gets cut a little bit short, and forever might just not be forever after all.   
  
There comes a point where she’s no longer suspended in the nova, where her cells aren’t trapped in a physical point of nothing and everything. And the afterlife? If anyone were to ask Jyn Erso, she’d have to say that the afterlife feels a lot like falling.   
  
\---   
  
The first thing she really registers is something gritty and wet on half of her face. The second thing is the smell of saltwater, and the feeling of cold air hitting all the points on her body that aren’t completely covered. The third is how heavy her clothes feel on her body. And the fourth is that she is so damn sore that it’s kind of incredible.    
  
Fifth, though, is that even though she can hear the wheeling of seabirds above her and the hiss of waves nearby, she can only hear them in her right ear. And sixth is that when she finally manages to open her eyes after minutes of trying to regain all her faculties, she can only see with her right eye as well. Half of her vision provides her a view of a black, gravelly beach, much like the one she remembered from her childhood when her father and mother were in hiding. Wet, black cliffs tower over the beach, which in turn slides seamlessly into gunmetal gray water speckled with white caps.   
  
She rolls onto her back with a strained groan to look at the rolling dark gray clouds above, and she reaches up with her left hand (which thankfully still works) and brushes the wet gravel from her face. Her fingers ghost over her left eye, and there’s a little bit of relief in the fact that she still has an eye at all. It can move, and no part of it seems to be missing. Her skull’s still in one piece as far as she knows. She just can’t see or hear out of that side of her head.   
  
If this is death, it’s much stranger than she thought.   
  
Slowly, and with great amount of protesting from every muscle in her body, Jyn is able to sit herself up. Her fingers grip the gravelly sand on both sides of her, and she revels in the cool, wet texture of every pebble that passes through them. Yes, she’s sore, and everything that could hurt  _ does _ , but the beach is not the fiery plasma death that she just went through. In fact, the longer she sits and takes in the breeze and the sight of the great gray ocean that stretches to an endless horizon, the more elated she feels. Although even her face hurts, she manages to smile. Her lungs fill with sea-scented air that is blessedly cold, and it’s not the raw fire that she was breathing before.    
  
And then, for the first time it what seems like ten thousand lifetimes, Jyn  _ laughs. _ She laughs so hard that it’s almost hysterical, and even feeling tears tracking down her face is the most beautiful feeling in the world. She can cry. She can feel something other than cell-vaporizing agony.   
  
And she thinks. She thinks as much as she can, about faces she remembers. Her father, his eyes tired and sometimes glassy from his thoughts being so far away, but always being so warm to her. She can remember the feeling of his arms around her, the roughness of his beard against her forehead when he kissed her goodbye, the wonder and amazement in his face when he saw her for the last time, when he clearly thought he would never see her again.   
  
_ Stardust, _ he said. The word alone brings fresh tears to her eyes, but a wider smile to her face.  _ Stardust. Stardust. Stardust. _ She can cling to that word, that wonderful nickname that defined them as father and daughter, and it feels good to even have one thing to hold onto.   
  
Cassian, then. Cassian Andor, holding her while she held him, feeling his pulse under her fingers, looking up into his eyes and feeling so sure of themselves, of the choice they made. In one glance, he seemed to say fifty things to her. Yes, her father would have been proud, but so was Cassian. So was Bodhi, and Chirrut, and Baze, and K-2SO, and the entire Rebellion. Their fight wasn’t for nothing.   
  
And in the end, with the dawn of their own death growing brighter in the horizon, she knew one thing for certain from him. He would have walked to the ends of the galaxy with her, to that point where they sat on the beach, and he wouldn’t have done a single thing different.   
  
Her tears feel hotter still on her face, and the vision in her good eye blurs. She covers her mouth with both hands, and it feels so damn good to sob and laugh and experience everything that she couldn’t be bothered to feel in the nova. She lets herself feel all of it, every iota of emotion, and she doesn’t hold a single thing back.    
  
And then, slowly, it occurs to her that if this is the afterlife, if she made it through to the other side and this is it, then...   
  
Jyn looks around, turning her head far in one direction, then another, to make the best use of her good eye. Black cliffs hang high over a black beach and a tarnished silver ocean. Gray-green hills slope up where the cliffs don’t. As far as she can see, it’s all empty, and she’s alone. But if this is it, if this is life after death, then she might not be as alone as she thinks.    
  
It takes a special kind of effort to pull herself up into a standing position, but she manages. She’s on unsteady feet, and having only half her vision has thrown her off considerably. Still, she takes a few steps towards the hills and cliffs, breathing in deep and relishing in every sensation she can pick up on that isn’t burning or pain or anything like being caught in the death ray.    
  
If this is the afterlife, if this is it, then somewhere out there, Cassian might be there as well.   
  
And Jyn starts walking.


End file.
